Another reason why your email & website should be hosted in Canada

PRISM sounds like an acronym from the cold war. I think about Get Smart or Man from UNCLE; secret handshakes and the dome of silence. The difference now is that the top spies are spying on us.

By now, I suppose everyone has heard about the National Security Agency surveillance programmes revealed by Edward Snowden last week. My guess is that Google and Microsoft and others were likely acting in compliance with the US Patriot Act rather than being involved in a conspiracy with the US Government as some in the media have implied. No matter how you look at it, those @hotmail and @gmail accounts are being reviewed by American security spies.

Does Webnames.ca email provide better personal security than gmail or hotmail? As far as we know, the answer is yes.

Webnames.ca email is exclusively hosted in Canada, so if the US Government came to us and asked to get access to our servers we would respectfully decline their request. So far – thankfully – Webnames.ca has never been asked by any government group to provide them access to your data.

Some of the conspiracy theorists may speculate that the spy guys may have secret arrangements with server facilities in Canada or that there are secret decoder pens that can sniff encrypted data, but that is more likely material for the next James Bond movie.

It is important to remember that the NSA issue has been around server access and not sniffing. When an email is sent in plain text it can be intercepted by a third party unless it is encrypted.

All Webnames.ca email supports encrypted HTTPS and while it is possible to setup and access Webnames.ca email with plain text, we don’t recommend it. When an email has left our servers with https, it is encrypted to the same standard that banks use for online banking.

If you are using webmail you should be logging into: https://securemail.webnames.ca and if you are using Webnames.ca email through an email client like MS Outlook you should configure your email for https.